Platform & Infrastructure Engineer

Jonathon Wright

Building secure Kubernetes platforms, automated infrastructure fleets, and GPU-backed edge systems.

RHELKubernetesGitOpsAnsibleObservabilityEdge AI

~/jwright ▸6 single-node Talos clusters · 0 SSH daemons · every machine is a document
cave139 apps · reconcilingalfredrobinkatewgirlelfastcnvidia computeintel computecore / services

01About

Reliability you can reason about.

I'm an infrastructure and DevOps engineer who turns high-level designs into single-press deployments. My day job is store-edge Kubernetes running GPU-backed AI; my craft is the automation, GitOps and network policy that make a fleet behave the same way every time. I've run global infrastructure at enterprise scale — a thousand VMs, multi-region migrations, segmented networks — and I bring that same rigour to the smallest edge node. I'm an IaC enthusiast: if it's a manual step, I want it gone.

Based
Sydney, Australia
Focus
Edge Kubernetes · GPU/AI · IaC & GitOps

# education

  • Advanced Diploma in IT Networking and Security
  • Diploma in IT Networking
  • Certificate IV in IT Networking
  • Ongoing study in IT certifications and new techniques
  1. Infrastructure / DevOps Engineer

    Aug 2025 – Present

    Woolworths

    Core DevOps infrastructure engineer for store-edge solutions — turning high-level designs into single-press deployments and CD pipelines.

    • Single-touch deployment of an edge AI solution running on Kubernetes at the store edge
    • GPU brought online as code — passthrough via ESXi, end-state manifests / Helm charts
    • Ansible playbook builds wired through a single source-of-truth pipeline with per-store vars
    • Removed manual practices across infra and ops — IaC throughout, spec-driven and documented as code
  2. Infrastructure Systems Engineer

    Aug 2022 – Aug 2025

    Virtus Health

    Global IT — optimisation, implementation and projects across an enterprise estate.

    • Managed ~1,000 VMs across a global VMware estate
    • Re-segmented flat sites into isolated VLAN ranges; SD-WAN and Aruba ClearPass onboarding
    • Migrated workloads to Azure (Blob, AVS); upgraded Palo Alto / FortiGate firewalls
    • Led a new major-site build — end-to-end services implementation
  3. Global IT Infrastructure Engineer

    Sep 2019 – Aug 2022

    Linde Asia Pacific

    Maintained and modernised global infrastructure to enterprise standards across the region.

    • Global VMware / Dell hosting; PowerShell automation of manual project tasks
    • Migrated Google Business → Microsoft 365 across the region; AWS-hosted ERP access
    • ERP hardware refresh with new mainframe and DR solution; PBX → VoIP across AU/NZ

+ 2 earlier roles (ELGAS, Darktime).

02Capabilities

What I work with, grouped by what it's for.

FLAGSHIP

Edge AI & GPU

Serving vision and language models on real hardware at the edge.

  • NVIDIA GPU Operator
  • GPU passthrough (ESXi, as code)
  • GPU readiness probing & watchdogs
  • Pod lifecycle management
  • YOLO / computer-vision inference
  • Local LLM serving (llama.cpp)
  • Edge Kubernetes

Platform & Virtualization

Kubernetes platforms designed to be reasoned about and recovered.

  • Kubernetes
  • OpenShift
  • Talos Linux
  • vSphere / VMware ESXi
  • Proxmox
  • containerd
  • ArgoCD / GitOps
  • Helm & Kustomize

Automation & IaC

Single-touch deployments — removing the manual step, not documenting it.

  • Ansible / AWX
  • PowerShell (PowerCLI)
  • Python
  • Bash / Shell
  • Terraform
  • Image pre-pull & air-gapped registries (ACR / NVCR)
  • Secrets management

Networking & Security

Default-deny, segmentation, and a small attack surface.

  • SD-WAN
  • 802.1Q VLAN segmentation
  • ACLs / IPSec / RADIUS
  • Aruba ClearPass
  • Palo Alto / FortiGate
  • Firewall policy governance
  • RBAC · 2FA / SSO

Cloud & Identity

Hybrid estates across the major clouds, with identity done properly.

  • Azure
  • Entra ID
  • Intune
  • AWS
  • GCP
  • Microsoft 365
  • Azure Blob / S3

Observability & Ops

Knowing the system is healthy — and the GPUs with it.

  • Prometheus
  • Grafana
  • DCGM Exporter
  • PRTG / LibreNMS
  • AWX job reporting
  • Veeam backup
  • ITIL processes

04Writing

Notes from the build.

Lessons from edge Kubernetes, GPUs, and running infrastructure like it matters — written up as I go.

  1. My servers don't have SSH, and that's the feature

    Every box in this fleet runs an OS with no shell, no package manager, and no SSH daemon — the entire machine is an API with a declarative config. It sounds like giving up control. It's the opposite: you can't drift what you can't touch.

  2. Observe first, deny second

    Everyone writes network policy from the architecture diagram, and the diagram is always wrong. The only allowlist that survives contact with production is one written from the flows you actually watched — applied out-of-band, proven enforcing, and only then handed to GitOps.

  3. SNAT ate my source IP

    A LoadBalancer service with the default traffic policy rewrites every incoming packet's source to the node's own address — so by the time a network policy sees it, the real client is gone. You cannot allowlist a sender the network has already erased.

Read the blog →

05Get in touch

Let's talk infrastructure.

Open to conversations about platform engineering, edge infrastructure, and GPU/AI systems. Based in Sydney, Australia — for a low-ms reply, ping me on LinkedIn or email; everything else is best-effort delivery.

[email protected]